The SEOTuners Blog

Monthly Archives: January 2016

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most effective online marketing techniques to get your brand visibility, gain higher rankings in search engines, attract more traffic and increase your revenues. A successful SEO campaign requires continuous effort, professional approach, and thorough understanding of the various nitty-gritty details of SEO. Several businesses – small, medium and large – hence prefer to outsource their SEO services to reliable companies based out of Los Angeles and Ventura, and other prominent SEO hubs of the world instead of doing it in-house.

SEO has evolved continuously with search engines coming up with sophisticated algorithms to better meet the needs of online users. Businesses are required to invest a lot of time, effort and money to leverage SEO and achieve their goals. The next few sections bring to you the reasons why outsourcing of SEO activities is considered to be a prudent step for business organizations:

Ongoing Process Requiring Continuous, Dedicated Efforts

Tying up your internal staff for SEO work that requires ongoing and consistent efforts is not advisable as you can be more efficient and productive by using your in-house pool of talent in your core business activities.

SEO work needs hours of dedicated effort every day/week. Publishing and distribution of high quality content and building of relevant links need to be done on a regular basis for significant results. In addition, you need to continuously fine tune your SEO strategies to stay ahead of your competition. By outsourcing your SEO work to reputed SEO agencies, you can save on effort and achieve more efficiency and higher productivity.

Always up on your Toes

SEO cannot be done with a laid-back approach. Search engines keep on updating their algorithms several numbers of times every week. There are new trends every day. So, you need to be always up on your toes to keep a tab on the ever evolving trends and algorithmic updates. This will allow you to better equip yourself to make the most of the opportunities and counter the challenges in a timely fashion. Only professional SEO companies have the experience and expertise in keeping up with these changes and ensuing measures to avoid potential Google penalties.

Link Building is Crucial but Risky

Links can both make and break the SEO game. While links continue to remain a major factor in deciding search engine rankings, these can also attract penalties in the form of drastic loss of traffic and rankings from Google. Link building requires continuous dedicated efforts. Earning relevant, high quality links does not happen overnight by magic. It requires persistent efforts that only professional SEO firms can perform.

Link building has always been Google’s yardstick for measuring a site’s popularity and therefore has always been considered as one of the effective SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategies. Link building formed the core of Google’s initial search algorithm and figured as one of the top parameters for website rankings. However, several sites tried to achieve ranks on search engine result pages by exploiting link building, resorting to unnatural links and spamming. This made Google to tighten its algorithms and penalize the sites with low quality, irrelevant and less trustworthy links. This led many to think that link building is less significant now and investing time in building links may not prove to be impactful. However, this is far from truth.

Link building is very much alive and continues to be as significant as ever. The only thing that has changed now is how we acquire these links. As Google algorithm evolves continuously, it is becoming more and more sophisticated in detecting unnatural link patterns. So, 2016 may see certain aspects of link building process, strategies, tactics and techniques to die, but not link building itself. As long as the world of Internet grows more powerful and people continue to connect with others and share their content, comments, ideas and messages, link building cannot die.

Companies that offer affordable SEO service through white hat SEO techniques will continue to focus on link building. However, the following unnatural link building techniques that have been widely used for past several years may not find a place anymore in 2016:

Black hat SEO techniques that result in tons of either only low quality links or only high authority links (as in case of private blog network) may become obsolete as Google’s Penguin algorithm updates consider such links completely unnatural and hence heavily penalizes sites with such links.

Unnatural link building practices resulting in sites gaining a lot of links in a short period of time followed by a sudden decrease. In Google’s eyes, this is unnatural as back links for any trusted and authentic site are acquired gradually with the rate increasing over a period of time.

Link building technique is no more about quantity but quality and diversity. Legitimate sites acquire links from different sources including comments, forums, blogs, etc. However, bad link building techniques result in a large portion of a site’s links coming from a single source such as blog comments. Too many links with the same anchor text can put these sites into Google’s radar.

Reliable and affordable SEO service providers just need to focus on techniques that allow us to build natural, relevant and quality links. Here are few link building tips that may go a long way today as well as in near future:

Invest in effective social media campaigns to get more of viral social traffic. Links from social media platforms is a great way to come into search engines’ notice.

Ask people and your acquaintances for links. In today’s times, there are very few who do not have a social media account, site or blog. Leverage it.

High quality guest posts offering useful informative content to readers and posted through a reputed guest posting agency could be really effective.

Build a personal brand online through social media platforms and other authentic online avenues.

Link building continues to be an essential part of SEO and successful online marketing strategies. All that matters now is quality link building and so we must put in our efforts in the right direction.

The competition in the online platform is fierce. This is evident from the search engine result pages (SERPs) that feature so many paid ads, images and other visually appealing elements – all trying to get the attention of online visitors. Appearing on SERPs alone cannot help win business if visitors do not click on your ad or website link. This is where rich snippets come into the picture. All leading SEO companies based out of LA (Los Angeles and Ventura) and worldwide leverage rich snippets to help their clients win maximum business.

Rich snippets are a type of on-page mark-up or extra bits of text providing additional pieces of information and appearing just below the search result. Rich snippets allow a search result to stand out in the crowd and enable an online visitor to make a well informed click decision.

Rich snippets are displayed along with your search results by search engines. So, you would need to make your pages eligible for rich snippets. This can be done by adding structured data of the appropriate type to your content that is relevant to your website and its products and services. Search engines such as Google and Bing have laid down certain policies for each structured data type governing the rich snippet display. So, it is important to make sure that you comply with each of these policies. It may take time for correctly marked-up content to trigger rich snippets in search results.

Some of the latest trends in rich snippets that businesses can leverage in order to improve the likelihood of online users to choose their page over others are as follows:

E-commerce websites can provide information about products including ratings/reviews, pricing, and availability as rich snippets. Google and other major search engines support rich snippets for ‘Product’ data type.

Google supports ‘Review’ data type for rich snippets. Businesses such as restaurants, hotels, travel sites, movies, stores, and other service based businesses can make use of review data for rich snippets display in their search results.

Search engines also display images of recipes as rich snippets for web search results on recipes. So, businesses that sell food or recipes can improve their online visibility by including recipe images (as content for rich snippets) on their recipe pages.

‘Event’ data type is also supported by Google and Bing for displaying rich snippets. So, organized events such as musical concerts, film festivals, award functions, art and craft exhibitions, technology conferences, and so on that people may attend can leverage this data type and provide appropriate markup content.

Companies offering software applications and solutions can also leverage rich snippets for enhancing their visibility on SERPs and attract online users’ attention. Google supports ‘Software Application’ data type and so any related information including its URL, review ratings and pricing can be provided as ‘marked up’ content for rich snippets.

Enabling rich snippets for videos is another latest trend for improving click rates. Video content can be marked up with structured data including information such as the title, description, thumbnail URL, date of upload, and duration.

Search engines are always trying to provide users with not only better search results, but also additional information to help them click on the right search result. They are more than willing to use your rich snippet markup to achieve this objective. This is the reason why every reputed SEO company in LA and elsewhere implements rich snippets for their clients.

Online marketing strategies such as search engine optimization rely on good content. Content is the key to get your website, products and services noticed in the digital platform and bring in more traffic. Search engines give utmost importance to sites and pages containing natural and relevant content that can interest online visitors. This is the reason why SEO companies in Los Angeles and Ventura and elsewhere focus on good content writing.

If you are looking forward to certain tips or pointers that can help you write relevant content for SEO, the following sections will make for an interesting read.

Write for your audience

The first and foremost thing that needs to be kept in mind while writing SEO content is your audience. Remember that your audience is a flesh and bone human and not a machine. Focus on writing interesting and informative pieces of content that can get your target audience’s attention. Do not always try to push your products or services rather share important facts or tidbits that can interest people. Discuss latest trends of the industry and make every effort to answer your target audience’s questions and concerns.

Create attractive headlines

Remember, headlines set the tone for your entire content and so a lot of thought must go into it. Try to keep it crisp, but catchy using power – packed phrases and statistics that usually work in drawing reader’s attention. You may be writing on some very mundane topic, but make sure your headline is attention-grabbing and relevant.

Forget keyword density; focus on optimal keyword use

Keyword density no more stands good, so forget about stuffing your content with keywords. Instead, focus on the natural flow of your content using relevant keywords and phrases wherever applicable. Another effective practice to rank your content high with search engines is to use related keywords, synonyms or grammatical variations of keywords. This helps in breaking the monotony of using the same keywords multiple times and thus makes your content more relevant and gets it noticed by search engines.

Get real insightful content

Bear in your mind that you are not writing an ad copy for some print, TV and digital media. SEO content is meant to generate traffic. So, feel free to write in-depth, thoughtful content that offers real insights into the subject matter. Write lengthy articles for not just because you have to write it, but because you have the knowledge and information that can be shared with your target audience. It is always advisable to do thorough research and get as much authentic and relevant information as possible while writing such articles. Remember, knowledgeable and interesting articles get more shares and links as against the short, superficial ones.

Incorporate tactics that allow easy readability

While longer articles and posts perform better with search engines, the same does not hold true for paragraphs. Keep your paragraphs real crisp and short. This helps in improving readability and also does not intimidate your readers. Another effective way to make your entire post easily readable is to use sub-headings wherever applicable.

Add pictures or images and get noticed

This is another effective way to make you content more relevant and to also get it noticed by search engines. However, make sure to include alt text for the images. More and more SEO companies in Los Angeles and Ventura and other parts of the world are using this tactic.

All these points must be kept in mind if you want to write good content for your SEO campaigns. These tips along with ideal SEO practices can go a long way in providing better search results and improved traffic.